


Familiarer

by Blake



Series: Pigeon Facts [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Jealous Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), M/M, Marking, Wound Cleaning, pigeon facts, tumblr ficlets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:46:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: At first, Arthur thinks it’s a mark left by his own clutching fingers on the back of Merlin’s neck
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Series: Pigeon Facts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2082732
Comments: 6
Kudos: 116





	Familiarer

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the anon who sent me the prompt for this! (I'm always happy to consider prompts [here](https://newleafover.tumblr.com/ask).) And to Phoenix, for naming Merlin's pigeon.

At first, Arthur thinks it’s a mark left by his own clutching fingers on the back of Merlin’s neck. This is because looking closely at Merlin has quickly become an even more fraught activity than ever before, and he hardly lets himself do it in public at all. Merlin is serving him at the dining table amongst company, and whenever his swollen lips push out slightly in a smile or he bends his sweat-mussed head to fill Arthur’s cup or he straightens Arthur’s silverware with his slender, gently curved fingers or he rubs the cuff of his sleeve across the stubble-burn pink of his jaw, Arthur does _not_ look.

But Merlin drops something, because of course he does, and Arthur’s eyes drift naturally to the bony curve of his neck as he kneels. The sight of the fine, red scratch stretching from beneath the tuck of his neckerchief to the tufts of his overgrown hair instantly makes Arthur’s stomach drop painfully low and heat rise on his cheeks, and so he looks away before he’s even examined it properly. _I did that_ , he keeps thinking, instead of listening to his father’s discussion of taxes. He has no memory of getting his nails in the skin of Merlin’s neck, but the thought that he has no memory of it because his senses were otherwise preoccupied at the time only serves to make his cheeks feel hotter.

The artless grin on Merlin’s face when he retrieves the object he’d dropped and returns to the vertical world rather makes Arthur forget about it altogether, and he can no more stop himself from looking at Merlin’s childishly victorious smile than a freezing man could turn away from the warmth of a fire.

He remembers later, though, when the smile is gone because he has kissed it into something wetter and softer, and his palm slides slowly down the narrow handful of Merlin’s neck. 

“What’s this, then?” Arthur manages to say against the pressure of the growing smug smirk on his own mouth. He thumbs up and down the length of the raw, raised pinch of skin, feeling quite pleased with himself, despite having no memory of intending to leave the mark.

Instead of innately knowing what Arthur was talking about because he, too, had been ruminating on it for hours, Merlin pulls away from the kiss and reaches up to rub his hand alongside Arthur’s with a confused pout on his lips. “What? Oh, _that_.” Merlin finally says, brushing against Arthur’s fingertips once more before dropping his arm. He’s blushing, which Arthur thinks might make up for the fact that he wasn’t previously aware of the scratch. Arthur is about to say something quite complacent about how Merlin should probably continue _practicing_ if he requires such vigorous manual correction in the heat of the moment. He is cut off by Merlin saying, “That was Buckley. He hates when I come home smelling like you. Makes him lose his mind.”

Arthur balks at the name of the pigeon, who he’s fairly sure should not have a name in the first place. His general state of numb despair is not aided by the fact that Merlin is _smiling_ and pulling the neck of his tunic aside to demonstrate _more_ bright red scratches all across his collarbones and sternum. “The pigeon did that to you,” he states, not quite finding the strength for the vulnerability it would take to make it a question. To his dismay, Merlin holds up the back of his hand, which he now notices is absolutely covered in bright red peck-marks.

“I’m afraid so,” Merlin says with a smile, like he thinks Arthur should be reveling in the fact that his love apparently renders a pigeon so violently jealous.

But Arthur’s stomach is twisting in sour, confusing knots. He’s ashamed that he’d been claiming ownership of a mark someone _else_ had left on Merlin’s body. He’s embarrassed that he couldn’t tell the difference between his own marks and the pigeon’s. He’s mortified—and maybe just a little bit pleased, if he’s honest—that the pigeon is familiar enough with the smell of him on Merlin to have learned to respond to it.

But most of all, he feels guilty that he hadn’t noticed the marks the whole time Merlin had been in his bed hours before. He replays the evening in his mind, and there’s no way that Merlin could have escaped to Gaius’s quarters in between being in Arthur’s bed and serving Arthur dinner, and so any marks acquired by Buckley must have happened _before_ Arthur went dizzy with want and blind with need and apparently utterly unobservant about the state of Merlin’s skin. 

“That filthy bugger,” Arthur grumbles, even though the words make his own face burn and Merlin’s eyes sparkle. He brushes his fingertips gently across the scratches, which look pink and angry, despite not appearing to have ever broken the skin.

“Oh, he’s not punishing me. He’s just trying to win me back, claim me, you know.” Merlin says, apparently some attempt at explaining why Arthur should _not_ be upset that he’s covered in infected scratches.

“We must get you to Gaius,” Arthur says, clenching his jaw in resistance to any thoughts of Buckley claiming his lover.

Merlin sputters in confusion for long enough that Arthur decides to explain that it’s not a non-sequitur at all. “I can’t have my manservant dying of infected wounds. People will think Camelot has gone rat-infested.”

As it turns out, Merlin keeps some yarrow poultice in the back of Arthur’s wardrobe, which explains why he has always had some at the ready every time Arthur came back from training with a scrape or two. Arthur has had the stuff on his skin many times, but never on his own fingers, yellow and sticky and trembling above Merlin’s now-exposed chest.

“If my wounds do get infected, can I have a day off?” Merlin asks while Arthur slowly, delicately, attempts to smooth the balm over the deepest scratch on Merlin’s collarbone.

“If your wounds get infected, I’ll have Buckley for breakfast,” Arthur says, instead of giving voice to his thoughts of Merlin lolling about in his royal bedclothes for an entire day, languid and complacent and never letting Arthur hear the end of it.

“You’re rubbish at this,” Merlin tells him, tucking his chin to watch Arthur’s suddenly clumsy fingers. But the tiny red buds of his nipples seem to draw tight, and his sternum goes shaky under Arthur’s wrist, so it can’t all be bad.

It feels only natural, once Arthur’s fingers have moved on to dress the back of Merlin’s neck, to let his mouth drop to Merlin’s throat, kissing the tender skin just above the highest scratch. He tastes the vibration of Merlin’s moan against his tongue like the best kind of bitterness, and then it hardly seems fair _not_ to reward such sweet sensations by kissing harder, biting down, drawing the impossibly thin skin between his teeth and sucking hungrily. Tension swells and fades under his lips, muscle flickers, breath flutters, and the moans--oh, Arthur could swallow those all day, right through this fragile barrier.

A few minutes later, when he has Merlin lolling around in his royal bedclothes, Arthur lowers his mouth to the taut stretch of Merlin’s sternum and watches unblinkingly as Merlin reaches to brush over the dark red, still-wet splotch at the base of his throat. It looks twice as obscene peeking between the pale splay of Merlin’s fingers. Arthur wonders what it will look like over the top of his neckerchief when he serves dinner tomorrow. _I did that_ , he keeps thinking.

Merlin grumbles when Arthur’s teeth latch too tight and catch on the hairs dusting his chest. “You know, Buckley also comes in my hair sometimes,” he says, and Arthur really wishes he hadn’t been looking so he could miss the ridiculous waggle of his eyebrows. 

Arthur has found that kissing Merlin has a much quicker effect than saying _Shut up_ , and so he kisses whatever other terrible words lie in wait on Merlin’s tongue directly off of it.


End file.
